This book is written from a Visual Basic 6.0 perspective although much of what is said is also valid for Visual Basic 5.0 and Visual Basic 4.0. It does not cover VB.NET, a rather different language. It covers many different techniques and topics including object oriented programming, optimization of programs and coding guidelines.

While programming, you may want to at some point save data so they may be accessible for further use. This is where file I/O comes in. Visual Basic allows us to perform most operations available in Windows Explorer and DOS command line.

APIs, short for "application programming interface", allows you to access a wide array of functions and methods exposed by the operating system or other applications (DLLs), performing operations not normally implemented by the standard virtual machine that Visual Basic provides.

An idiom is a sort of template or generic method of expressing an idea. In the same way that idioms in a human language make life easier for the both speaker and listener good idioms in computer programming make life easier for the programmer. Naturally what is idiomatic in one language might not be in another.

Many algorithms were described long before computers were available and many have both naive inefficient forms and sophisticated efficient forms. In many cases this is independent of the implementation language.